


ex-friend is another way to say boyfriend

by promise_june



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Attempt at Humor, Established Relationship, Fluff and Humor, I don't know what I'm doing, M/M, he forgets to do one thing for a couple of weeks and it comes back to bite him later lmao, poor jeno just wants to sleep after exams, someone save me i can't edit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:14:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26410963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/promise_june/pseuds/promise_june
Summary: "Renjun, what did you do?”“All I said is that we’re not friends anymore.”“That is honestly the worst way to tell people that we’re dating now.”In which Renjun says a thing to Donghyuck, then Donghyuck says the thing in a groupchat, and the next thing Jeno knows, he has three of his best friends questioning him about something he didn't know happened. (But really this might be kind of his fault for forgetting to tell them his new relationship status himself)
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun/Lee Jeno
Comments: 15
Kudos: 186





	ex-friend is another way to say boyfriend

After a long week of exams, all Jeno wanted was to knock out and sleep for 20 hours straight. Or, at least, to take a nap before he met up with his boyfriend for dinner. Unfortunately for him, the universe seemed to have other plans for him. His head had barely touched the pillow when his best friend slammed the door open and yelled, “Answer your texts, Jeno!”

Jeno groaned, sitting up to greet his friend, "Jaemin? Nice to see you too, I guess."

Jaemin seemed desperate as he grabbed Jeno’s collar. “Lee Jeno! What did you do?!”

The other boy was confused by the sudden attack, trying to shake off his sleepiness. “What did I do?”

“You know what you did! Why’s Donghyuck, telling, me, that, you, and, Renjun fought,” Jaemin shook Jeno to punctuate his words. 

“Fought? Fought who?” Jeno was now visibly puzzled. 

“Fought _who_? You, you idiot!”

Mark burst through the door, in a similar state of panic as Jaemin. “JE NO IT’S OKAY WE’LL FIX THIS.”

“Mark-hyung? Fix what?” Jeno felt a little overwhelmed by the sudden intrusions, ”What’s going on, guys?”

He shook himself out of his groggy state, concerned by how worked up his friends were, and picked up his phone from the table. 

Jeno frowned as he swiped up to see hundreds of messages from his friends in their groupchat and in private messages. He had kept it on the 'Do Not Disturb' mode during his exam and hadn't had a chance to check his notifications yet. Before he could take a closer look at the messages though, a call popped up on the screen. 

“Wait hold on guys Jisung’s calling,” Jeno ignored the noisy boys in front of him to pick up his phone.

The garbled mess that came through the call as Jisung spoke rapid-fire startled Jeno. 

“Jeno-hyung what’s going on what happened with you and Renjun-hyung Chenle said you’re not friends anymore why are you fighting what did you do hyung what did he do why is this happening I thought you guys were getting closer oh my god I’m such a terrible friend for not realizing!! I should’ve noticed we hadn’t met up with the two of you recently!” 

When Jisung finally paused to take a breath, Jeno interrupted, “Everything’s fine though, Jisung?”

“What do you mean ‘it’s fine’, hyung?! This is _not_ fine! You can’t fight with Renjun-hyung! That is not _fine_!” Jisung seemed to be almost in hysterics at the thought, his voice shaking as it increased in volume. Jeno winced and pulled the phone away from his ear. 

Jaemin took advantage of his distraction to start questioning him. "Yeah, Jeno, what is going on? You're supposed to tell me about these kind of things!"   
  
  


With Jaemin’s nonstop nagging next to him and Jisung chattering endlessly by his ear, Jeno felt that his surroundings were far too noisy for him to handle in his current state of sleep deprivation. 

He looked to Mark for help, but the older boy seemed crestfallen, staring at the ground and mumbling vaguely. 

“Ah, what should I do… Donghyuck’s gonna kill me now… This is a bit… Really, what should I do…”

"Mark-hyung?" Jeno called out to him hopefully, but Mark just continued muttering to himself under his breath. 

“….maybe Donghyuck will forgive me if I help let Renjun deck Jeno? Just once… if he really deserves it?” Mark seemed to gain confidence in his idea as his thoughts turned in an odd direction.

Fortunately for Jeno, it seemed, Jaemin caught that part of Mark’s statement. “Mark! No! You can’t sacrifice Jeno to Donghyuck!”

“What if we let both of them hit each other once?” Mark seemed hopeful. 

"No hitting will be happening." Jaemin gave Mark a severe look. 

“Ooookay, let’s all take a deep breath and sit down. I get the feeling this might take a while.”

“Why are you all assuming it’s my fault anyway?” Jeno couldn’t help but whine a little. 

Mark and Jaemin exchanged glances. 

“We’re not, but it’s like—” “We don’t, but—”

They both paused to reorganize their words. 

“Half-half.” Jisung beat them both to the punch. “We think it’s both of your faults. If it were entirely Renjun-hyung’s fault, we would know because he’d have already come to us for advice.”

Jeno’s eyes widened a little in surprise. He hadn’t known that Renjun had made such efforts with his apologies. 

"Anyway, he's been locked up in his room working on a project, so it's not like we could talk to him. Honestly, it's a miracle we managed to find you."

“But it’s been two weeks since we’ve seen you guys, and we haven’t heard from him at all. We have barely seen _you_ and every time we have, you looked half-dead.” Jaemin’s voice was gentle, as if attempting to comfort Jeno. 

Mark speaks up next, “Honestly, we’ve never seen you guys fight for this long, and we’re all a bit worried. It’s quite uncharacteristic of you to hold a grudge."

They all looked so serious that Jeno couldn’t help but doubt his own memories for a moment, wondering if he really was fighting with Renjun. 

After a tense moment of silence, Jeno laughed. The two boys in his room looked at him like he was crazy - they probably thought he had lost his mind. Jeno swore he could even feel the judgement coming through the call from the phone in his hand.

“Renjun and I aren’t fighting. We’re getting along _very_ well now, actually.”

Jisung questioned, “But then why did you look so terrible when we saw you this week?”

“Because it's midterms week? That’s why I’m ‘half-dead’, as Jaemin put it, and you haven’t seen me around much. You know my study habits.” Jeno had a bad habit of cramming everything last minute, exchanging his sleep and healthy living habits for his exam grades. It usually worked out, so he figured it was probably fine for now.

“Okay, but what about last week? We saw you guys in a stand-off on the street. And you guys were ignoring each other.”

“Oh, that’s because we were arguing—“ “Aha! So you admit—” “About ice cream flavors. He just couldn’t admit that mint chocolate chip is the superior flavor.” (It didn’t really matter to Jeno, actually, but Renjun was cute when he was all riled up about something.) 

Jaemin gasped, “You take that back.”

Jeno shrugged in response.

“Jaemin-hyung, I don’t really think your opinion on ice cream flavors is valid when you actually enjoy eating _coriander_ ice cream.” The disgust in Jisung’s voice was clear, and Jeno could easily picture him scrunching up his nose at the thought of coriander ice cream.

Mark seemed to be re-evaluating his life choices as his friends squabbled about ice cream flavors loudly. 

Jeno zoned out, only startling back to awareness when Jaemin and Mark suddenly turned to face him again. 

“And what about the time Chenle caught you guys fighting? He said it looked like things got messy.”

Jeno seemed confused by the question, tilting his head as if trying to recall the incident. “Fighting? Oh!” This time, Jeno flushed red, his ears coloring as well. “That… wasn’t a fight,” he said in a tiny voice.

Jaemin narrowed his eyes. “That sounds suspicious.”

“What do I have to do to prove myself?? Show you my texts with Renjun?” Jeno rolled his eyes exasperatedly. 

Mark had mostly just listened, but now he spoke up with a question. “How did you even have time to do so much with Renjun if you were so busy with exams we barely saw you?”

Finally, a question Jeno could answer easily. “We were supposed to be studying together since we didn’t have time to go on a date.”

“A DATE?!” The simultaneous screeches from Jaemin and Jisung blasted his ears. 

Something seemed to click in Mark’s head and he dropped his head into his hands. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

Jeno paused, reviewed his recollection of the past few weeks, and realized he hadn’t updated his friends on the recent development. “Oh, whoops. My bad. I forgot to tell you because of the mess of exams. I’m dating Renjun now.” 

“Dating?” Jaemin seemed to have realized something as well. 

Jeno felt a little bad for not having told them yet. It hadn’t been intentional, it was just that every time he spoke to his friends recently, his mind was occupied by worries about his second set of midterms. _Could you even call them midterms if they didn’t even occur in the middle of the semester? Why were there so many exams anyway? A midterm should occur once, in the middle of the term, shouldn’t it?_

As he had dazed off in his mind with complaints about the exam system, Jaemin and Mark seemed to have clarified things with the confused Jisung on the phone. 

“So, if you’re not fighting, then why would Donghyuck say so?”

“I don’t know. What exactly did he say?”

The two boys quickly took their phones out and scrolled back through a chat history, then froze in place as they found his texts. 

Jaemin and Mark looked at each other and simultaneously gritted out a name. “Donghyuck.”

From his phone, Jisung’s low voice drifted out, “Jeno-hyung, I’m gonna go find Chenle now. We’ll see you at lunch tomorrow. Probably.” A beep indicated that Jisung had hung up the call. 

The three boys just looked at each other silently for a few moments, then Jeno spoke up. 

“Well then, if you guys have things figured out, I’m gonna go sleep now. I haven’t slept in about 40 hours and all this was exhausting.” Jeno dragged himself back into his blankets, and promptly passed out. 

  
~

Three hours later, Jeno woke up feeling marginally less like a zombie. He somehow managed to put himself together enough to walk over to Renjun's apartment. 

The first thing he did after reaching was to summarize his afternoon chaos and question Renjun. Because he knew his boyfriend had a hand in the mess somehow. 

“Renjun, what did you do?”

“All I said is that we’re not friends anymore.”

“That is honestly the worst way to tell people that we’re dating now.”

After Jeno explained the chaos that had just occurred and Renjun was done laughing at him, they settled down into the couch to watch a movie. 

“So Donghyuck thinks we argued?”

“Oh no, he knows.” Renjun showed Jeno the wall of texts from Donghyuck as he had progressed from ‘ _what the fuck Renjun_ ’ and ‘ _you’re fighting with Jeno???_ ’ through to a confused ‘ _but I saw you guys at the library together yesterday???_ ’, then all the way to the realization with ‘ _Renjun you asshole i can’t believe i actually got scared for a minute_ ’ and a final ‘ _i’m not gonna be the only one to suffer this_ ’. “He just wanted to mess with the others.”

“And Chenle?”

Renjun hummed, “He saw us last week when he came back to pick up some clothes, remember? And he was here when Donghyuck called to yell at me. Probably got the idea from him.”

Suddenly a thought catches in Jeno’s mind. “You knew and you didn’t warn me?”

Renjun evaded his gaze, tilting his head back to look up at the ceiling. “Ah, hmm… Well— You see—”

“Renjun..." Jeno said with reproach. 

Jeno looked so down Renjun could almost see puppy dog ears hanging down. He blinked to clear his vision from the hallucination. The sleep deprivation had to be getting to him. 

“Sorry,” Renjun said consolingly as he caressed Jeno's head. “I’ll accept any one request of yours as an apology.”

“Really?” Jeno perked up, a sly grin crossing his face. “How about… a horror movie marathon then?”

Renjun groaned, but acquiesced. “Fine, but you’re staying here tonight. Don’t you dare abandon me to the ghosts. You’d be down one boyfriend regardless of whether I survive or not.”

Jeno laughed, then slung his arm around Renjun’s shoulders. “Of course, of course, I’d never abandon you to face all the scary monsters and ghosts alone.”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked it! I wanted to write something sweet and short because noren deserve sweet things, and I've had this sitting in my drafts for about a month now.... AO3 forced me to finish it and post because it was gonna delete the draft, although I ended up remaking the draft anyway lmao
> 
> Is there logic to this fic? No not really, I tried but failed and kind of gave up since it's been so long, just take it as a fun short fic  
> So, yeah, I'm pretty sure it's kind of terrible but here it is, I don't think it'd get much better even if I kept holding on to it
> 
> Kudos and comments would be very welcome! 
> 
> My [cc](https://curiouscat.me/promise_june)! (if you'd prefer to go anon)


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